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Mary Worth, 9/28/18

One of my very favorite things that sometimes happens on this blog is when I make an outrageous prediction about the future course of some soap opera strip’s plot that then almost immediately comes true! So yes, Mr. Wynter really did spend more on his dog’s grave than on his wife’s. At least Bella’s monument is relatively tasteful, with Bella depicted as she was in life, wearing her adorable bow tie, and not as some kind of terrifying supernatural winged cat chimera like whoever’s buried in the plot just behind her. The second panel is great, because it shows what Bella would see if she were buried alive and had like a little hole in her casket attached to a periscope or something.

Six Chix, 9/28/18

Look, one of the advantages of having a multi-artist production like Six Chix is that you get a variety of perspectives and voices, so I’m as confused and disappointed by “big horny animal week” as everybody else.

Spider-Man, 9/28/18

“Say, Danny, have you ever considered using the incredible privilege and authority you wield in our society to better people’s lives, instead of putting on a mask and punching people unusually hard? Just spitballing here!”

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Mark Trail, 9/26/18

OK, wait, what? Are these guys not in league with artifact-napping Becky? Are they actually a rival gang, working at cross-purposes with her? Or are they part of Mexican law enforcement, investigating in plain clothes to try to break up an artifact smuggling ring? When Rusty and Mara confront Jo(s)e and his associates, they’ll say “Kids, you’ve got it all wrong! We’re federales! You know, the Policía Federal, the institutional successor to the former mounted police!” And then Rusty and Mara will say, “If you’re the police, where are your badges?” And they’ll say, “Badges? We ain’t got no badges! We’re working deep undercover and can’t afford exposure. Showing you any stinkin’ badges would risk all of our lives!”

Mary Worth, 9/26/18

Oh, man, Mr. Wynter is an old grouch because he was forced to marry a woman he didn’t love! I certainly hope that we get smash cut from Bella’s lovingly tended grave in the pet cemetery to the overgrown potter’s field into which his hatèd wife was tossed without ceremony when Mr. Wynter was finally, blessedly, free of her.

Dick Tracy, 9/26/18

I’m reasonably sure that’s been well established that Honeymoon and Crystal are social outcasts at school, what with them both being mutant freaks and all. Still, I have to give props to this drug gang for trying to map out the social networks of the schools where they’re trying to sell their wares in order to maximize brand awareness rather than just having someone stand outside and say “Hey, kid, wanna get high?” to everyone indiscriminately like some half-assed dealers we could mention. It’s like the time the illicit tattoo parlor in Gil Thorp tried to woo twentysomethings by getting high school-aged customers: wildly misguided, but at least you’re putting in some effort to come up with something clever.

Hi and Lois 9/26/18

Hey, kids, it’s 2018! Why not try to get your fairly specific fetish into an extremely square syndicated newspaper comic strip? Nothing matters anymore!

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Mary Worth, 9/20/18

If you’re ever in Baltimore, I strongly recommend that you drop by the Baltimore Museum of Art (admission is free!) and check out the Cone collection, an amazing assembly of impressionist art that was put together by two sisters over the course of the late 19th and early 20th century, with pieces by Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne, Gauguin, and other heavy hitters. The sisters only left their collection to the museum upon their death, and while they were alive much of it was just hanging on the walls of the relatively modest Baltimore apartment they shared. There’s a computer reconstruction at the museum, and you can see that every surface was just covered with these masterpieces, even in the bathroom; they were probably what would be diagnosed today as hoarders, who just happened to have the eye and wherewithal to hoard incredible art.

Now, we’re only seeing a pretty small portion of Mr. Wynter’s apartment here, and things aren’t at quite the density of the Cone sisters’ home, but just the fact the even on this little stretch of wall we have not one but two pictures of Bella sporting a bowtie to match her owner makes me hope that each step deeper into his condo unit is leading Mary into a disorienting spiral of omnipresent Bellas. Local lech Charley plastered his walls with “art of a kind … I suppose” but that perversion will be nothing compared to the bug-eyed dead dog nightmare that is Wynterhaven.

Mark Trail, 9/18/18

Everything that’s actually relevant to the plot in today’s strip will presumably be spelled out shortly, which is good because I intend to spend the rest of the day not thinking about that at all but instead imagining Rusty playing with “Snap-N-Rap,” which I assume is an app you use to upload videos of yourself rapping to Snapchat. “My name’s MC Rusty and I’m here to say,” Rusty raps, Mara beatboxing in the background, “I do foolish things and get into trouble and need Mark’s help every day!” The video goes viral, and more importantly contains location data that Snap-N-Rap harvests and shares with its advertising partners and mysterious group of Chinese investors.

Funky Winkerbean, 9/18/19

The thing with Funky Winkerbean is that I honestly have a hard time figuring out its narrative point of view sometimes. You’d think that, when you have a plot where a group of comic book dudes get extremely pumped after coming up with a character called “Atomic Ape” who’s going to be a “Lone Ranger in space” (a real thing that happened in this strip), but then one of those dudes gets very upset when a lady suggests that “Atomic Ape” have a sidekick named “Charger Chip,” the point is that the dude is being dumb for getting upset about it! But, like, also, the standard Funky Winkerbean party line is that Superhero Comic Books Are Good, and the world of superhero comics today is actually full of adult dudes who take their obviously goofy superheroes extremely seriously, and resist any attempts to make them not dark and gritty, especially when those attempts are seen as coming from or catering to women, so who knows! Maybe we’re supposed to be rooting for Mopey Pete here! How dare some woman try to water down the masculine majesty of Atomic Ape, the Lone Ranger of space?